Hugh Fitzgerald: Israel and the Reconquista of Language

For quite some time, now, Israel has been out of the headlines. There’s been so much else going on in the Middle East and in the wonderful world of Islam. Among the dizzying vicissitudes, in Iraq and Syria we’ve had nonstop news about many different little wars, involving Sunnis and Shi’a, and regime supporters and regime overthrowers, and various endangered minorities (non-Muslim or non-Arab) – Christians and Alawites and Kurds and Yazidis in the mix, and everyone, including insufficiently-fanatical Sunnis, under attack by ISIS, while ISIS itself attracts hundreds of thousands of foreign volunteers to its not-inconsiderable caliphate carved out of northwestern Iraq and southeastern Syria, and that caliphate still stands, despite repeated hopeful predictions from Washington of its imminent demise. In Egypt, Mubarak was toppled and replaced by Muslim-Brotherhood Morsi, who in turn was toppled by a secularisant Al-Sisi, and during these ups and downs, Egypt’s Copts have endured levels of torment that varied directly with the level of Islam in the government. In Libya, Qaddafi was overthrown with Western help, but instead of becoming a peaceable kingdom, the country he once ruled with an iron fist then descended into a chaos of warfare among different factions and militias, some based on their city of origin (Misrata, Benghazi, Zintan), others distinguished according to tribe or politico-religious ideology, and to this tripolitanian tohu-va-bohu, with two different “Libyan governments” now sitting in Tobruk and Tripoli, can be added the Islamic State, which has just opened a branch office in Sirte.

The fact of so much other news driving Israel from the front pages does not mean that the war against Israel has disappeared. The Slow Jihadists of the Palestine Authority (quondam PLO) continue to be supported by the U.N, and by the E.U., while the Fast Jihadists of Hamas have both Iran and the Islamic State in their corner. Jews are still attacked — more than two dozen Jewish civilians have been stabbed to death in the last few months — and just the other day, Hamas promised a new campaign of putting bombs on Egged busses. But without minimizing this continued violence, the Arab threat Israelis now face is simply not at the same level as was that posed by the massed might of several Arab armies – the most important were always those of Egypt and Syria — that in 1973 and 1967 and 1948 made war on the Jews of Israel. Israel is not at the moment facing that kind of danger: the Syrian military has, after four years of civil war, simply deliquesced, and the Egyptian army is more interested in destroying Hamas tunnels than in going to war against Israel, for Al-Sisi’s men understandably have little appetite for sacrificing Egyptian men, money, and materiel yet again for an “Arab” cause.

While Israel has a breathing spell, it should work to improve its hasbara — public diplomacy, public relations, propaganda. It has to be more vigilant about the terms of the debate. The first phrase to go should be “Palestinian people.” Prior to the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, no Arab leader, diplomat, intellectual, anywhere used that phrase; they always spoke about “Arab refugees.” It only began to be employed after the military defeat in June 1967, when it became clear that the Arabs would, before attempting another military assault, have to soften up Israel, isolating it diplomatically, and making the world forget that the Arabs started that war, and the one in 1948, long before the “Palestinian people” came into existence. From 1967 on, Arab propagandists have been involved in the “construction-of-the-Palestinian-identity” project, creating a “people” by promoting a word from geographic adjective (“Palestinian”Arab) to ethnic noun (“Palestinian”). This sleight-of-word contributed mightily to the invention of the “Palestinian people” — a “people struggling for its legitimate rights” and doing it “in Palestine, where it lived since time immemorial.” To start with, in its counter-campaign, Israel should use every occasion to bring up Zuhair Mohsain’s admission to the Dutch newspaper “Trouw” in 1974 about the propagandistic value of this fictive “Palestinian people”:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.

And Netanyahu, who is sensitive to language, should make it known that from now on, the Israeli government will officially refer not to the “Palestinian people” (as it has so heedlessly done in the past) but only to the “Palestinian Arabs.” And that will remind the world that the “Palestinians” are just one part of the Arab people, the people more generously endowed than any other, possessing 22 states and 14 million square miles of territory. But Israel won’t achieve that desirable result unless its own leaders and diplomats and journalists agree among themselves to stop using the phrase “Palestinian people.” Make clear that that phrase is not neutral but highly tendentious.

Second, Israel should hold up the word “Occupied” — as used in the phrase “occupied West Bank” or “occupied territories” or still worse, “occupied Arab lands” — for inspection. For the word “occupied” is being used to suggest that Israel has no claim to the “West Bank” or Gaza other than the temporary one of being military occupant. One thinks in this regard of “Occupied Berlin,” “Occupied Vienna,” “Occupied Paris,” “Occupied Japan” – in these designations, the territory in question is under the control of an outside power or powers, that control has been won through military conquest, and the claim to that territory is understood to be temporary, based solely on that military occupation. But Israel’s claim to Gaza and the “West Bank” is not based on the fact of military occupation. These territories are properly thought of as unallocated parts of the Palestine Mandate, and the provisions of that League of Nations’ Mandate still apply. The Mandate for Palestine was created by the League of Nations for the sole and express purpose of creating the conditions for the establishment of the Jewish National Home; the territory assigned to that Mandate included Gaza and what would later be called the “West Bank.” The fact that the Jews did not end up in possession of Gaza and the “West Bank” at the end of the 1948-49 war did not change the legal status of those territories; Israel’s claim to them rests on the Mandate itself (and let’s not forget that there were other Mandates leading to the creation of Arab states, a British mandate for Iraq, a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon); that legal claim was not extinguished but remained, and Israel’s military conquest of those territories in the Six-Day War did notcreate a new claim, but did allow Israel, coming into possession by force of arms, to finally exercise that prior claim to those territories based on the Mandate. And when Israel voluntarily gave up its claim to Gaza – for reasons of intelligent self-interest – that had no bearing on Israel’s continued claim to the “West Bank.”

Instead of continuing to accept this use of the word “Occupied,” the Israeli government ought to make a fuss every time that word is used by others – foreign leaders or diplomats, U.N. personnel, BBC announcers and New York Times columnists – but a well-informed fuss, a fuss that will remind people of the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, which undergird the Israeli claim to the territories it won in 1967. Eventually, by dint of repetition, some will begin to grasp the point being made, and others, who may still refuse to accept the point, at least will be forced to discuss the issue of what the word “occupied” means and why Israel has a point about its misapplication that cannot be easily dismissed. Force others to look at, to study, to discuss, the terms of the Mandate for Palestine. And that discussion will, for Israel, constitute at least a partial victory.

Third, and finally, the Israelis should make sure always to use the word “Jihad” to describe the war that has been made on them even before the Jewish state was declared in 1948. In the past, it may have made some sense not to use that word. Two major Muslim powers – Turkey and Iran, that is Kemalist Turkey, and Iran of the secularizing Shah — were unofficial allies of Israel. There was an intelligent capitalizing on anti-Arab feeling among both Turks and Persians. Why needlessly antagonize these regimes, the Israelis felt, or cause them trouble in maintaining their covert alliances with Israel, by reminding their Muslim subjects of the duty of “Jihad”? But the situation now is different. Turkey’s Kemalists are out and Erdogan’s real Muslims are in, and in Iran the Shah’s secularist ancien regime has been replaced by Khomeini’s epigones, fanatical Shi’ites all. There is nothing to be gained by not starkly presenting the war against Israel, truthfully, as a “Jihad.” And since some (not all, not even most, but some) Europeans have become sufficiently alarmed at their own situation, that is, the internal threat from their own burgeoning Muslim population, to have undertaken the study of Islam on their own (their governments being of no help in this matter), and have to recognize that a “Jihad” is being waged against them, too, anything that can be done to further the understanding of a commonality of interest and a sharing of the threat, between Europe and Israel, or among Europe, Israel, and the rest of the Infidel world, because they are all engaged in the same war of self-defense, against the same enemy, making war on them for the same reasons — can only be salutary.

This Reconquista of the lexical battlefield will be long and arduous. But for Israel, and for Infidels everywhere, there is no other choice. And now I’ve listed — correctly, I hope — a few places to start.

Comments

It seems to me that there are competing claims to territory that are not reconcilable. I am not anti-Israeli as Israelis are not threatening worldwide terrorist acts. I am looking at things as an outsider. I can see that some early peace deals were overturned by PLO terrorism.

However the issue of semantics over the term ‘Palestinian’ is interesting but it does not change that there were Arabs living in the land before the mass immigration of foreign Jews, especially European ones. In many and perhaps even most cases the Arabs were forcefully and even violently expelled from their homes. I don’t know the numbers but it is easy to see why the ‘Palestinians’ (and not all were Muslim); are not accepting of the State of Israel as it was at their families expense.

As “outsider” you are trying to convince us of your impartiality. Nice try. The fact that arabs were not forcibly removed from their homes has been admitted even by the arab leaders. The jews were forcibly removed from their homes in the arab countries, 800,000 of them. Israel begged the arabs not to leave and many arabs stayed. They are now 20% of the population. Those who moved, had hopes for looting jewish properties and lost an aggressive war. Try to think of any examples in history, when the enemies were invited back after their genocidal attemp has failed. Pretending not knowing the facts, which are easily available and pushing moslem propaganda can only fool one, who wants to be fooled. Tells a lot about you as a person.

Not at all! I have a totally open mind on this and I am pretending nothing. I have no Left Wing agenda. Israel has Arabs in its parliament and better rights for women and minorities than many Arab countries. I had heard of Arabs being invited back. I have also seen interviews with people who were forcibly evicted. Israel is not unique in this. We could talk about American Indians or Australian Aborigines but most people are unlikely to say the European descended people hand it all back. The problem is that the state of Israel is so recent a creation that there are plenty of memories about its establishment that are not all rosy – forcible evictions (which may also have been contrasted with efforts to reassure the Arabs) and even terrorism by some Zionist groups against the British and Arabs. i am interested in any information on the topic.

People normally don’t believe anybody who has a reputation of being dishonest. There are so many times the palestinian arabs have been dishonest that to believe they are telling the truth is not possible. Palliwood is the best example of it.
Israeli terrorism has been a response to arab terrorism. It took years for the jews to respond. Finally they did. Jewish terrorists were hunted not only by the brits, but by the fellow jews as well, unlike the arab terrorism, which had full support from all the arabs.
The present situation is not about the land, house or refugees. It is pure jihad. Only antisemites paint it as something else. Arabs don’t want peaceful resolution of the conflict. Look at the PLO or Hamas charters. I don’t buy any interpretation of the conflict except for jihad. Any other interpritation is based in anti-semitism. Why else anybody would want another terrorist state, especially with what is going on in Europe, were anybody can see the real face of islam?

BTW. American Indians and Australian aborigines were there first and have no agendum to kill all Europeans. Jews were in palestine long before the arabs.
Europeans in America and Australia,unlike the jews, did a lot of damage to the natives and in memory of this I am personally doing everything I can to help the aboriginal people in my country. It is not easy. Often the help is not appreciated, but they have different mentality and have to be understood. After all they are not like an arab from Gaza trying to blow up an israely hospital, where he was treated. One cannot get lower then being a moslem arab, although one can get pretty close by supporting them.

Those indigenous people, in most cases, could not go to a second country. Plenty was done by ‘settlers’ to help Aborigines and Indians too. We could argue that ultimately they were ‘liberated from the Stone Age’ but in the process their populations were, at least for 100 years, greatly diminished by disease and loss of land and their cultures partially lost.

The Arabs migrated into these lands in the mid to late 1800s after the Jews returned and irrigated the land to make it prosper. The Arabs came from neighboring Syria, Jordan and Egypt to get work. This was not their land. It never has been. Look at the names of the so called Palestinians. They are all Syrian, Jordanian or Egyptian. Yassar Arafat was Egyptian. There is also no Palestinian language.

The ONLY sovereign nation that ever existed on this site was the state of Israel which was conquered by the Romans and assigned the name Palestine. Israel is not a “recent creation.”

Thanks for the history. It is very complicated. On the other hand were European Jews really ‘returning’. There is doubt about how much genetic link there is with the original Jews of the Middle East who are more closely related to Arabs. Given the ancient occupation of the area by Greek derived Philistines should a Greek state be established there?

There are some facts wrong here. The Arabs came about 1000 years AFTER the Jews to Palestine in ancient history. In modern History, only after the Jews worked the land and drained the swamps, there was work for Arabs in neighboring countries. They came from Syria and Egypt. Jordan was part of Palestine which was the destined homeland given to the jewish people in the Balfour Declaration by the British who controlled the area after the fall of the Ottomans. Most can trace their roots to elsewhere in the Arab world as Arafat was born in Egypt.

Zionism was created largely by secular Jews who wished to have a country as secular, but as nationalistic, as other Western countries…a country where Jews could live free of discrimination for the ‘crime’ of being Jewish.

The whole of the Palestine Mandate was to have been the Jewish homeland, then 3/4 of it were to be ‘Jew-free’ and only 1/4 open to Jewish immigration. The 3/4 eastern part of the mandate was handed over to the Hashemite family. Until 1946, its British administrators called TransJordan — ‘Eastern Palestine’.

The Palestinian flag was created after the 1967 war by removing the Hashemite star from the Jordanian flag. There’s the clue.

Palestinians and Jordanians have always declared their goal to be the reunification of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Palestine into one state as their ultimate goal.

”The Palestinians and the Jordanians have created on this soil since 1948 one family — all of whose children have equal rights and obligations.” – King Hussein, addressing an American delegation, 19 February, 1975

 “For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”- PLO representative Zouhair Muhsen in 1977, speaking to a Dutch newspaper

Cornelius, I believe you’re missing the point. The 1964 PLO charter confirms Hugh’s point: it is full of references to “Palestinian Arabs,” rather than to “the Palestinian people,” which only came into existence, as he correctly noted, after the Six-Day War.

In 1967, as a teenager living in a country hostile to Israel, I remember joy and horror I felt after 6 days war ended. The joy was because of one of the greatest military victory and the horror listening to Dayan speach, inviting arabs to be equal citizens of Israel. There was no doubt in my mind that most of the arabs will be moved from Israel to Jordan. It was clear to a teenager that letting the arabs to stay, will create a perpetual problem, which will get bigger as time goes by. Israel won the battle and lost the war. For the moslems it was clear. They understood the reality and that understanding was reflected in the Hartum declaration. Israelis didn’t understand the reality for many years, many still don’t.
The opportunity to correct the mistake might present itself next year, when a friendly president occupies the WH. Annexation of Judia and Samaria is a must move for Israel. With Europe going moslem any time, there will not be another chance for a long time, if ever. Abdullahi of Jordan has no choice in his present position, but to cooperate. Netanyahu has a chance to go into history as the greatest leader of modern Israel. Such a move will have huge repercussion in the world as well. It will be a blow to Islam, from which Islam may not recover for a long time.

Thanks for this essay about the lexical battlefield. Do the many statelets in your illustration refer to the cartographic battlefield? In Egypt we can see statelets roughly shaped like Iowa, Nebraska, and Nevada.

“…[1]remind the world that the “Palestinians” are just one part of the Arab people, the people more generously endowed than any other, possessing 22 states and 14 million square miles of territory…
[2]instead of continuing to accept this use of the word “Occupied,” the Israeli government ought to make a fuss every time that word is used by others – foreign leaders or diplomats, U.N. personnel, BBC announcers and New York Times columnists – but a well-informed fuss, a fuss that will remind people of the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, which undergird the Israeli claim to the territories it won in 1967…[3] finally, the Israelis should make sure always to use the word “Jihad” to describe the war that has been made on them even before the Jewish state was declared in 1948…”

Apart from 14m square miles the Arabs have also received at least $27trillion in a growing soft power vortex of oil revenue. They are either too stupid to have deployed it effectively or we are only just hearing the first bursts of sabre rattling. We’re still lining their pockets you understand?

And while we’re insisting that term “occupied” and “occupation” be applied scrupulously and not where it does not apply, we might also insist on pointing out two other occupations which never seem to get mentioned by those who are obsessed with Israel’s “occupations”:

Balochistan: Balochistan is a region of Central Asia with an ethnic identity (Baloch) and language, which is occupied by three Muslim countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran

West Sahara: occupied by Morocco and currently there is an insurgency against that Moroccan occupation

And there is Occupied West Papua, too: the western half of the island of New Guinea, north of Australia. It has not a *shred* of historical, ethnic or even geographical continuity with the Malay Muslims of Java and Sumatra. There were virtually NO Malay Muslims living there *until* Muslim Indonesia “annexed’ it due to the historical accident of *both* ‘Indonesia” *and* West Papua having been temporarily colonised and ruled by the Dutch. The Muslims are ruling its indigenous non-Muslim non-Malay Melanesian Christian and animist people-groups with *great* cruelty, pillaging its natural resources for their own profit, and using hijra (Muslim migration) to demographically swamp its indigenes, whilst *also* carrying out mass murders.

What is being done to the non-Muslims of West Papua is classic Jihad; typical Muslim methods for crushing and destroying an indigenous non-Muslim population of newly-seized territory.

The original Palestinians were the Peleset, and they came from Mycaenae (Greece) in the 11rh century BC. The Peleset were the biblical Philistines, from which we derive ‘Palestinian’. But during the Muslim invasion of the Levant in the 7th century, the Arabs not only extinguished the Pelest-Greek people and stole their lands, they stole their name too.

That’s very interseting You could probably look at most countries as coming into being from various invasions and displacements, although the Philistine displacement occurred a very long time ago and the Arabs had been settled thee for centuries before the Israeli State came into existence.

The Peleset and the Philistines were the same people, and arrived in the 11th century. The Phoenecians were from Cyprus and Egypt, and arrived before the Peleset. The Israelites were also in Judaea before the Peleset, but were thrown out of Judaea by the Romans in AD 70. The region was then largely Greek and Phoenician.

The Arab Muslims arrived in the 7th century, but were temporally pushed back out of the region by the Crusaders in the 12th century (all these lands used to be Christian). So the Arabs have been there for 13 centuries, but as overlords using the Christian population as dhimmi serfs. This is why the Christian population of the Near East has fallen from 90% to 5%.

The Arabs were actually overlords in the Middle East only until the 13th century. After that, they were ruled by non-Arabs, the most significant being the 400 years under Ottoman control. Yet, for many in the West, the up to 25 years of Western rule during the Mandates period (the one for Palestine was the longest lived) is somehow the key to explaining Arab backwardness and frustration.

Media-wise, this is an American presidential election year when the “soft Jihad” is always observed. (Or, “soft-Gore Jazeera” when they were still around…)

They (so far have) put things on “cruise control” and well below the speed limit because they get no mileage in the Western media until a year from now. (Unless incumbent jihadist goes to mosque, or something splashy…hoping to incite more anti-muzzo headlines)…

p.s. The indiscriminate use of huge colored maps to go with generalities… Well, poor/panic journalism.

Another term should be retired, and that is “West Bank.” This name was coined around 1950 as part of Transjordan’s rebranding itself as Jordan while seeking to obscure the Jewish history of the lands conquered in 1948-49 that it now sought to annex. Before then, it was “Judea and Samaria.” These terms appeared on every map as well as in, among other places, the description of the proposed “Arab State” in the 1947 UN non-binding partition resolution.
In every other instance, a bank of a river covers an exceedingly short distance. That such a geographic absurdity is now commonplace speaks to the success of Arab propaganda.

Well said. I was recently particularly proud of my Australian government. Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop recently announced that the Aust Govt would be referring to the West Bank as ‘disputed’ instead of ‘occupied’. They have copped plenty of bullying and insults all over the world from all the usual suspects.
If only the media weren’t wholly owned and run by leftist, elitist, politically correct morons, perhaps the general public might be more exposed to a balanced view of the true history of Israel in the context of its perpetual self defence from the Islamic Jihad waged against it.
If people knew the power of words they would know just how loaded the international debate on this issue has become.
Consider an Al Jazera story:
Palestinian Shot Dead by Israeli Crossing Guard;
A Palestinian was shot dead in the occupied West Bank on Saturday. Allegedly he tried to stab a border crossing guard.
Now consider how it should have been told:
Terrorist (or Jihad) Attack Against Israeli Crossing Guard;
A Palestinian Arab tried to stab and kill an Israeli crossing Guard on Saturday. He was shot and killed in the botched attempt.

Words matter and in this debate, Israel is suffering from a powerful ‘jihad’ of words in the international arena…

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